Washington Post Op-Ed Likens Obese To Air Pollution

By consumerist.comApril 13, 2006

There’s a hilarious op ed piece up at the Washington Post, equating fat people with air pollution. Not the strange gases emitted simultaneously with the obese’s impressive spectrum of farting noises. The fat people themselves.

The author, John Sotos, likens the obese to congealed miasmata of loathsome fat molecules drifting across the American landscape. And he’s deadly in earnest.

Sotos writes: “Food calories are so pervasively and inexpensively available in our environment that they should be regarded as a pollutant. Just as an asthmatic can’t help but inhale pollutants in the air all around him, we Americans cannot help but ingest the calories present in the environment all around us.”

The solution? Sotos suggests government intervention or perhaps some sort of Fatty Kyoto accord to deal with the problem. Ultimately, he wants high calorie products to cost much, much more than low calorie ones.

Some prospective losers would understand that change presents opportunity. They would welcome the program as an impetus to diversify and do the right thing for the public health. Potential losers having a narrower, self-serving vision might resist the program fiercely.

Yes, it certainly is narrow and self-serving to believe in the freedom to do something as simple as eat the food you want to eat without some busybody, hunched over with his entire forearm up his rectum, comparing you to an industrial spill and siccing the Hazmat team on you.